Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis

The contemporary urban world has embarked on a new tech-century with a foundation of infrastructure fortified with digital networks, optic highways, sensors, and surveilling devices. With their increasing use in urban projects, smart urbanism is now a ubiquitous term to describe our everyday urban life surrounded by smart devices in the home, office, and everywhere. Seduced by the speculative promises of smart urbanism, governments are deploying technology-led solutions for urban management, provisions, and future growth. India is attempting to achieve a better (urban) quality of life and national economic aspirations through its ambitious Smart Cities Mission (SCM), launched in 2014, and develop 100 smart cities across the country. While the SCM aspire to produce ‘new hybrids of power-knowledge networks, that simultaneously traverse the discursive, material and digital realms in the postcolonial city’ (Datta, 2018, p. 407), urban scholars have been critical of the seemingly top-down techno approach of smart cities (Das, 2019; Soderstrom et al., 2020). Beyond the top-down approach, cities in the Global South are also witnessing an increase in citizen-led approach to tech appropriation for their cities, bottom-up initiatives, and making cities socially smart and liveable. Our in-depth empirical work from three smart cities in India (New Delhi, Varanasi, and Bhubaneswar) inform us that beyond the federal narratives of smart urbanism, the local municipal and state government agencies have negotiated power dynamics, the production of smart narratives, and localized the smart urban policies/interventions. The three case studies will showcase localized experiments, mutations, and provincializing tendencies of globally recognized smart tools for local urban futures.